The Inventory could use some love

I loved the Ultima 9 style inventory (BACK PACK), it's designed with love (I think), the good thing about the new inventory is searchable, indexable etc ... but can we have best of both world.
Anyone thought the same?

 

We had best of both but the visual style (bag mode) was scrapped as it took more resources to maintain both and few people used the bag mode (though probably because it wasn't fully formed in terms of features).

RIP bag mode.

 

add a auto-stack button at bank

 

For me, the best of both worlds would be a text-based window rather than a graphic bag, but instead of the current tabs (which I find mostly useless), have tabs based on containers. So what I would have is a front tab that shows exactly and only what you're wearing, wielding, or have equipped, and then a separate tab for each container you're carrying.

This wouldn't work with the current "You can carry a million things loose in your hands WHILE carrying a sword and torch too, who needs containers?" scheme. But I'd gladly give that convenience up in exchange for better organization, and not having to triplecheck my inventory every time I sell or store something to be sure I'm not losing something I want to keep on me, because the things I want to keep would be IN THE BAG WHERE I PUT THEM and not mixed into my main window with all the recent loot.

It would also required changing things so that the backpack and the cloak no longer occupy the same slot, since people would need a backpack to carry new loot in and wouldn't want to give up their cloaks in exchange. But putting them in the same slot never really made sense to me anyway.

Ah, dreams....

Short of that, I think the best thing they could do for the inventory would be (a) as with the UI overall, make it more eye-friendly, and (b) update the actual items so that they consistently stack when they ought to, consistently have distinctive names (even Brown Jug A and Brown Jug B would be better than two Brown Jugs that have different shapes), and consistently have bigger, better icons that actually allow you to tell the difference between similar items. But that would require updating all the individual items, and changing the inventory system itself would probably be quicker.

 

I'm glad that actually people replied on this post, I decided to post some pictures of previous Ultima's design just for comparison, to illustrate what I mean and what I've missed. It's kinda pleasant and satisfying to have all those loots visually in my bag (or other containers), also it's a way to increase capacity, think of Diablo's inventory (divided bag/ box into slidable slots).
Actually, it's one of the kinda trademark or authentic thing that reminds me about the Ultima series, ...

I mean I'm a developer my self, I understand why they did it this way, for functional and stuff ... but for gaming and what makes it great ... are mostly visual pleasure; rather than icon+words+table+columns UI (you know what I mean) ... these are the small little things that doesn't need to be very logically neat but what I called it crafted with "love", or this is just another inventory mgmt application.

I still remember I spend some sweat time organizing my backpack and look at the things I've collected so far, but I don't feel it right now ... just some text and icons, ...

I'm not trying to sound criticize or making any comparison, but as always I believe the SotA community help to form this game together, polishing every edge.

Cheers to the team, SotA really started to feel like a new legend by itself.

Ultima 7


Ultima 8 - Pagan


Ultima Online


Ultima 9 - Ascension


SotA - pre-alpha


SotA - current (somewhat)